Why must we buy our good news?

Canadian Tire's jobs carry price tag of $24,000 each

Hey there, time traveller!This article was published 2/5/2013 (1316 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If your glass of ice-cold Red River water is perpetually half full, the announcement of 50 new high-tech jobs coming to the heart of downtown is exciting enough to make you actually drink the murky stuff.

But if your glass is half empty, the sobering notion each one of those gigs comes with $24,000 worth of government incentives may drive you to consider quaffing something a little stronger.

WAYNE GLOWACKI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS

Canadian Tire's cloud computing centre will be located on the second floor of the Air Canada building. Purchase Photo Print

On Thursday, Canadian Tire announced it will create 50 new jobs in Winnipeg when it opens up a "cloud computing centre" in the Air Canada building on Portage Avenue. The positions in question are precisely the sort of jobs this city and province absolutely must create in order to retain young, creative workers.

The knock against Winnipeg over the past few decades is its economy just hasn't offered enough in the way of opportunity to recent university graduates with the ambition to work at the razor's edge of their respective fields.

The belief, sometimes but not always borne out by statistics, is that young, university-educated Winnipeggers are more likely to flee this city than their counterparts in, say, Toronto, Vancouver or Calgary, where there are more cutting-edge jobs due to the presence of corporate headquarters, the film business and the oil industry, respectively.

Of course, not all the jobs younger workers find involve new technology. This notion, popularized by fetishistic business-press coverage of high-tech giants such as Google, Microsoft and Apple, portrays all 20-something workers (and even those in their 30s) as spoiled little babies who want espresso machines on every floor, a row of vintage video games against every wall and office hours so flexible no boss will ever care when they come and go.

In reality, most young people just want a job that pays well, keeps them interested and simply does not suck. So, if you're a Winnipeg university graduate who happens to be one of the 50 people qualified to work in Canadian Tire's new "advanced cloud computing centre," you may just be able to stick around the Manitoba capital long enough to complain about a few more winters and the lack of Canadian Football League championships.

The price of this centre to the public purse, as revealed on Thursday at a press conference, is at least $1.2 million in government incentives.

That includes $900,000 to $1 million worth of provincial tax incentives that will allow Canadian Tire to purchase equipment, provided Canadian Tire makes a minimum $10-million investment, Premier Greg Selinger said.

It also includes up to $300,000 from the city as part of what Winnipeg property director Barry Thorgrimson described as an "economic development incentive package" that will be presented to city council later this month.

That works out to $24,000 in government spending for each of the 50 jobs, though more may follow if the Canadian Tire venture is successful.

It's not clear how much of those incentives will be recouped in the form of business and property taxes that will be levied against the new high-technology office. The city package, as yet unveiled to the public, may simply involve tax breaks.

Downtown will also benefit by filling up 28,000 square feet of vacant office space with people who should have more earning and purchasing power than call-centre employees.

Nonetheless, it's still hard to escape the unfortunate message: Every nice thing we get in Winnipeg comes at the cost of a public subsidy.

Nonetheless, Selinger and Mayor Sam Katz are not concerned about the optics of this particular piece of public spending.

Selinger said the new centre will add to a critical mass of new-media business in Winnipeg. "The new-media sector has been doing very well," he said. "The products we're creating here have the ability to attract investment."

That may very well be true. But this city will only be considered a success story when it can attract investment without spending cash to bring it here.

You know what's even better than 50 interesting jobs? A day when a great, new business can set up shop in Winnipeg without making the mayor and premier feel compelled to attend the press conference.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca

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